Green Day: Basket Case

Learn to Play This Song

• Play both Rhythm and Lead Guitar
• Detailed Multi Camera tuition.
• 25-30 Videos for each Song
• Song Structure & Chord Diagrams
• Guitar Pro Interactive Tab
• Band Practice and Jam Sessions
• Over 30 Songs available

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GREEN DAY– Basket Case

My favorite 80s were over and it was getting harder and harder for me to find quality music to listen to. I didn’t like grunge at all, with some small exceptions like the Crash Test Dummies and a couple of Nirvana’s songs, but in general I didn’t like the direction music was going into, so I stopped trying to follow what’s happening on the music scene for a while. In one cold and rainy spring day of 1994, I was visited by a good old school friend of mine. He brought me a cassette with Green Day’s third studio album – Dookie. I wasn’t familiar to how Green Day sounded back then, because I only knew them as a name thanks to their Kerplunk album that got them a record deal with Reprise Records a couple of years earlier – one of the major record labels at that time, which was owned and operated by the Warner Music Group.

So, I played that cassette and I was more than pleasantly surprised. This was the freshest release that I was hearing in a long time and it immediately boosted my spirits in that otherwise depressing rainy spring day. I liked nearly all the tracks, especially Burnout, Welcome To Paradise and Basket Case, and I really liked the overall musical direction of this release. That lively and modern punk rock sound was exactly what I needed to get away from the grunge wave that had already flooded all the radio stations. Only a few months later Basket Case hit it really big, spending 5 weeks at first place of the Modern Rock Tracks chart, getting 9 MTV Music Award nominations and earning the band a Grammy award nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Group. Basket Case also had a very original video, which was shot in a real mental institution and was inspired by Billie Joe Armstrong’s real panic disorder experiences. The video received a serious airplay on MTV and remains one of my favorite music videos up to this day.

Of course, I wanted to learn how to play Basket Case by Green Day, so that I can include it in my party repertoire (in other words – the songs I played to friends when we were throwing parties). The song had some really catchy guitar riffs that I later found out were based on the harmony of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. Although Basket Case sounded really nice and simple, it turned out that the palm muting parts aren’t easy to play at all, because of the speed, agility and endurance they required from my hands. But I knew what the key was – practice, practice and… practice. So, after several months I mastered the song and me and my friends had some great times playing and singing it together on parties.

Learn to Play This Song

• Play both Rhythm and Lead Guitar
• Detailed Multi Camera tuition.
• 25-30 Videos for each Song
• Song Structure & Chord Diagrams
• Guitar Pro Interactive Tab
• Band Practice and Jam Sessions
• Over 30 Songs available

Get More Details Here